Building Traffic to a Website

Nov 25, 2007

So, advertising revenue from a site is linearly related to:

• the number of ads available to be seen on the site (which is a multiple of the number of ads per page and the number of pages to have ads on), and
• the number of people who actually see them, i.e., site traffic.

To make money from advertising, you need a large flow of visitors to your site, because very few visitors actually click on ads: according to an expert friend of mine a CTR (click-through rate) of 2% is great! This is not surprising - I don't visit websites to look for advertising, and I don't expect you do, either.

The first step to increasing traffic is to know how much traffic you've already got. Web hosting services often offer at least rudimentary traffic reports. Before I changed laptops, I primarily used Awstats, as set up for me by my friend Sean at AnteZeta ("Merit-Based Search Engine Marketing"), but I also used ClickTracks (in its free "appetizer" form - sadly, no longer available), and my web hosting service, DreamHost, provides web stats from Analog for free. Google Analytics is a useful free online tool that I'm now perforce getting to know better. In my work for Sun Microsystems, I use a powerful monster called Omniture.

I admit I'm a stats junkie, but let's leave that for another discussion...

Submit Your New Site to Search Engines

FAQ: "Should I pay some service to submit my site to a slew of search engines?"

Consider these stats for traffic sources to this site in the last 12 months:

As you can see, Google and Google image search between them brought in 67.4% of my search engine traffic. Yahoo and MSN... well, a lot less than Google.

In other words: all you really need to do is make sure Google knows about you, and mop up a few of the other top search engines if you want to. Then don't get deindexed.

RSS Feed

If you're using blog software to run your site, be sure you enable the RSS feed. If you're not using blog software, it's worth creating a feed manually. In either case, you should run it through FeedBurner - they have all kinds of cool features, not least tracking your feed's daily traffic (as an example, see traffic to my own two feeds as reported by FeedBurner).

The feed will bring people to your site, especially if you do NOT include the full article in the feed, but only a teaser. It also helps to display a graphic or photo in the feed (something that illustrates the article, of course) to entice people to click through and read.

Specialized Directories

There are zillions of specialized directories out there, and each will bring in a bit of traffic. These include BlogHer (for women bloggers), various podcasting and videoblogging directories, special-interest directories such as those for expats. Join as many as you can find that are appropriate for your site and topics. About.com has subsites specialized for just about anything. I don't know what it takes to catch the eye of their editors - I wrote to their Italy section experts several times without response, but I do get traffic from there, so at some point someone noticed me.

Squidoo Lenses

My Squidoo lens on Living in Italy brings in small but steady traffic for minimal ongoing effort.

YouTube

A few weeks after I started using YouTube videos in my Learn Italian in Song section, I began noticing referrer links from YouTube - not many, but one or two, here and there. I couldn't understand why YouTube would link to me, but soon afterwards John Chow mentioned this little feature that I'd overlooked - click the number next to Links to open the list of the top five sites which cause the most plays of this video:

NB: You can read the YouTube page for any video displayed on my site (or anywhere else) by clicking the YouTube logo in the video's lower right corner.

Having a link from YouTube is already a small bonus (and these links are not likely to go away unless/until the videos do: I'm far and away the top traffic generator for most of "my" songs). It doesn't get me a lot of traffic but, hey, every little bit counts!

It Takes Time

Lots and lots of time, and constant effort, especially in the beginning.

Coming up: Still more traffic-building techniques.

I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions on building traffic to a website/blog